The people who pronounced Apple dead were the ones who noticed that Apple was losing very large amounts of money in the mid ninties. Apple only became profitable again when Steve Jobs came back on board and introduced the iMac.
If Apple continued in the path they were in before Jobs came back, then they probably would've been dead by now.
I wore an analog watch through most of elementary school and the first half of high school. When the strap broke, I found it was cheaper to buy a digital watch than to replace the strap, so I've been wearing mostly digital watches since then. Despite that, I find it easier to tell time on a digital watch. Mainly because I've grown up with digital clocks all around me - on the microwave, the vcr, the car radio, computer, etc.
I rarely think of time as half past four but rather as four thirty. I can usually tell the time rather quickly on an analog watch that actually has all 12 numbers written on it, but if you show me a watch that only has 12, 3, 6, and 9 on it, then I'll have to spend time thinking "is the hand closer to the 12 or the 3?"
In general, I think digital watches are practical, whereas analog watches are more for show. When I wear a suit, I feel awkward if I wear a digital watch. But in a more casual setting, I'll take a digital watch anyday.
Well, all the exploits I've seen had %01%00 in the URL. I have no idea what the %01 could be doing, but character 0 is used to mark the end of a string in C.
What's happening is MS is converting the %xx codes into individual characters and then handling the string with standard C functions, which stop when they hit character 0. Probably the right solution would be to notice the character 0 while parsing the URL, and simply not allow the URL if character is present.
A 9.1 gig hard drive - just one - costs $10 shipped from a [computergiants.com]reputable seller. [resellerratings.com] Another vendor [yahoo.com] is selling them for $5.99. How much do you think MS would pay for a few million?
Those $10 hard drives are models in the clearance bin because no one wants a drive that small. The seller is taking on loss on them just to get rid of the inventory. You won't be able to get someone to produce drives for you at prices like that.
Yeah, because not having a hard drive will somehow stop people from trying to get Linux to run on an X-Box, just like it stopped the folks from bringing it to the DreamCast and Game Cube.
There's a noticable number of people running Linux on the Xbox. You could probably count on your fingers the number of people that have tried using Linux on a GameCube. A GameCube running Linux is really only useful as a dumb terminal, whereas an Xbox with Linux can practically be a full computer.
Hey, I've got a good idea! Lets release a ten year old game at full price! But wait, there's less! Lets remove all the cooperative multi-player that made the game actually worth playing! No wonder The Lost Vikings bombed. It was decent as a 1-player game, but only truly great as a 2-player game.
As much as I want to agree with your logic, I can't.The GBA probably has almost as many ports of NES & SNES games as it has original games. Most NES & SNES ports are selling well on the GBA.
If you're downloading VisualBoy Advance, get version 1.5. 1.6 had bugs in the BIOS emulation. In 1.7, several of the choices in the Tools menu would cause VBA to crash on me. I didn't use it long enough to find out if the BIOS bugs were fixed.
Yes, I'm well aware that Xeons can go over 4 megabytes. But they can't go over it in one large block.
For most applications, you wouldn't notice if you were using segmented memory with segments of 4 GB. The only difference would be a pointer would be 6 bytes instead of 4. But when you actually need more than 4 GB to store one giant matrix, it would be very difficult to work around the limits.
I've never seen a matrix solver that could deal with the large memory schemes of 32 bit x86 chips. Even if one could, it would be a lot slower than doing it on a 64 bit chip.
I just did some work porting CFD code from IRIX to an Opteron system running Linux. The processor had to be 64 bit because some of the runs we do now require 15 GB of RAM.
I only did the porting work - I only have a vague understanding of how CFD works. So I can't say what percent of the runs require more than 4 GB of RAM, but I've gotten the impression that most runs require over 2 GB of RAM, which is enough to complicate things with a 32 bit OS.
These are also the same analysts that keep saying that Nintendo is dying, despite Nintendo continually raking in huge profits.
Don't start about their loss for the first half of this fiscal year. They posted a net loss of 3 million yen due to a 40 million investment loss. That means that if there wasn't a huge drop in the value of the US dollar, Nintendo would've posted a rather nice profit. You win some and you lose some when you invest your money in different countries. Note that Nintendo said they still expect to meet their projected profits for the entire year.
The analysts also predicted that the price of all the consoles would have a significant drop back at E3 last year, which didn't happen. The PS2 got replaced by a version that came with the network adapter for the same price, with existing stock getting a $20 price drop. The Xbox got a $20 price drop. Nintendo did nothing. This was with the analysts expecting $50+ price drops.
Saying that the console's price will drop sometime within the next 9 months is a pretty safe bet to make when you consider that the last price drop was 7 months ago. That price drop was a pretty minor one ($20). The last significant price drop was in May of 2002 when it dropped from $299 to $199.
NASA doesn't use very modern chips. They use old designs because they want stuff that's been well tested. If you're talking 20 MIPS, then we're probably talking about a chip that's 10-12 years old or so. I doubt there is much, if any, of a pipeline in the processor. This is probably around 486 level technology.
I think SMB3 got bundled later on, but the vast majority of its sales were standalone. Most NES systems sold came with SMB1, and there were relatively few standalone copies of the game sold.
The problem with WinRAR is it looks like the UI hasn't been updated since the Windows 3.1 days. The artwork is all ugly & low color. The dialogs all just look out of place. There's something I just can't place about it that feels wrong.
Technology wise WinRAR is a good program. But it's about as usable as a circa 1995 app for X11.
Everyone knows what happens in Episode 3, but what we don't know is how it happens.
How does Anakin become Vader? Where does the name Darth Vader come from? How come he doesn't know about that Padme has twins? How does Palpatine gain total control? How do all the Jedi die? What Jedi survive other than Yoda and Obiwan? Will there be an answer to why Obiwan and Yoda fade away when they die, but the Jedi we've seen die in Episodes 1 & 2 don't?
The biggest question I have is in Episode 3, will we see Anakin become Darth Vader, or will we see Anakin "die" and then Darth Vader first appear soon after?
There's also Super Smash Bros Melee, Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance, Capcom vs SNK, and a few other lesser known games.
racing is Mario Kart:DD or F-Zero GX.
There's also Wave Race Blue Storm, Need for Speed Underground, Burnout, and at least a few others.
Team sports is NHL 2004, while extreme sports is Tony Hawk 4.
Granted Sega dropped their sports line from GameCube after the first year, but EA releases all their sports titles for it. Acclaim releases All Star Baseball. Midway has NFL Blitz and NHL Hitz for the extreme stuff. And there's Mario Golf and soon Mario Tennis if you want more party type sports games.
RPG is Zelda, etc.
Well, Zelda isn't an RPG. If you want RPGs, the Cube is a pretty bad choice as their are very few, although Namco has several coming out later this year. If you want Zelda type games, there's also Star Fox Adventures and Beyond Good and Evil for starters. Both of which are really cheap.
Nintendo's problem isn't so much a lack of games, but rather everyone just buys all the Nintendo first party games and ignores the 3rd party games. I've mostly just bought Nintendo's 1st and 2nd party games since the N64 days. Mainly because after getting the 1st and 2nd party must haves, I didn't have the time or money for many other games. So on Nintendo systems, 3rd parties get less attention and sales. Particuarlly the companies that just make crappy ports.
Associating Pokemon & rape would piss Nintendo off for good reason. That's a simple case of defending their trademarks.
Nintendo has never tried to stop people from working on emulators. When Shigeru Miyamoto was asked about them in public, he said he was flattered that people cared enough about his games to write emulators for them.
Nintendo's emuation is bad stance strictly comes down to the vast majority of people using emulators are doing it with pirated ROMs, which they have no tolerence for.
484.96 sounds pretty low to me. The GameCube CPU is a modifed version of the PPC 750 running at 485 MHz. Based on the site you linked, I'd expect it fall in between these two entries:
Why would you use Linux to develop a GameCube game?
All you'd get is a lot of unnecessary overhead. The hardware is designed to be incredibly simple to program. You don't have to deal with things like IDE to read from the DVD. To read from the DVD, you put a pointer to your memory buffer in one register. Put the write command into another register. There's a third register to check for status (finished, in progresses, error, etc). That's it. Adding the Linux kernel in there won't make it any easier.
Since the discs are read-only, the filesystem becomes much simplier. IIRC, fragmented files are not supported. So really the filesystem isn't much more than a table with each entry containing a name, a start location, and a size. Doesn't take long to write code for that.
The networking code is the only part of the kernel that's really useful on the GameCube. But rather than include an entire operating system, you're probably better off simply taking the networking code out of one of the BSD's and including it directly into your project.
If you're doing small homebrew projects, a full OS is way overkill for your game. If you're intending on making a commercial game, your choices are license the game with Nintendo, or have your own DVD manufacturing plant and reverse engineer the barcode & any other copy protection mechanisms on the discs. If you have the money to have a DVD manufacturing plant, then you can easily afford to pay Nintendo the licensing fees.
Basically, Nintendo has this illusionary image that they are a good, consumer-friendly company. And they are that for the most part. Even still, they're mostly just a company like any other -- if you get in their way, they will not hesistate for a second before coming down on you like a ton of bricks.
Nintendo is a very consumer friendly company. It's very rare to have a problem with their products. I own an NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, and GBA. I've had a total of 2 problems over the years. My SNES didn't come with a power cord, and the free Zelda Collection disc I got last month was damaged during shipping. Both times I called them up and they sent me what I needed via next day air. No hassles at all. They didn't even ask me to send back the broken Zelda disc, or ask for any kind of proof that I had just bought an SNES.
Nintendo doesn't mind emulators or homebrew development. In fact, they like homebrew development, because it means there's a pool of people who can program their hardware that they don't have to spend time training. But once you get into piracy, then they go all out and don't cut you any slack.
But it's their copy protection (burn/read from outside to in, among other theories) that has really stumped emulation enthusiasts like myself.
The idea of the data starting on the outside and working in has been tossed around a lot, but no one has really tried to test it.
What has been proven to be the main factor in the copy protection is the barcode around the inside of the disc. The barcode is found near the center of the disc, just a little further in than the data. The barcode can't be burned onto a disc - it must be put in during manufacturing. You need to use a microscope to make out the bars, but if you're magnifying it enough to distinguish them, you won't be able to see anything but the bars, leaving you no frame of reference, making it impossible to map the bars.
To my knowledge, only a small group of people have figured out how to rip a GC disk, and they're not sharing how. Developers of the Dolphin emu probably know how to do it as well.
It's simple to rip a GC disk. Load a program using the PSO exploit. Write code to read from the DVD and send the data over the network. Code for all of that is readily available.
I own the game and I had to read that several times to figure out what you were talking about. I can't imagine how that must sound if you've never seen the game before...
The key isn't a problem. You don't need to know the key ahead of time. CSS encryption is so badly designed that you can brute force find a key within a few seconds. Any recent Linux DVD player doesn't contain a key, it just looks at the DVD and figures one out.
They're admitting CSS isn't a trade secret anymore. If you know CSS, then it only takes a few seconds to find a key. Based on that, how can you justify calling the key a trade secret?
1) I think Europe has some restrictions on importing goods. These laws may not effect CD-WOW though, as they are based in Hong Kong and simply ship to Europe. The article didn't say if they actually have European offices.
2) A lawsuit doesn't have to be valid to file it. Even if BPI lost the suit, it would cost CD-WOW a lot of money defending themselves. Lawsuits are very expensive, and since CD-WOW specializes in selling really cheap CDs, it would really hurt them to have a long legal battle.
Yes, in the US price fixing is illegal. But if you read the article, in the scope of this story, it isn't price fixing.
CD-WOW was buying their CDs from Asia, where they are cheaper, and then selling them in Europe. BPI objected to this on the grounds that CD-WOW was violating their copyrights by not buying the CDs from Europe. Rather than fight a long legal battle over copyright issues, CD-WOW decided it would be easier to simply buy the CDs sold to Europeans in Europe than to fight it out. The price increase is due to increased costs for CD-WOW, not due to BPI insisting on them raising prices.
Yes, we all know that there is price fixing involved in CD sales, and that is what this *really* is about, but the actual case that was going to go to court was one of copyright infringement. CD-WOW was selling CDs for 9 pounds. You'd have to sell a huge number of CDs at that price to pay for lawyers to defend you against music industry lawsuits.
The reason the CDs were cheaper was because of where they were being bought from. The CDs were being bought from Asia, where they sell cheaper, and then being sold in Europe. The music industry wanted them to buy the CDs from Europe. Rather than fight it out in court, the store agreed with the music industry's demands and started buying the CDs from Europe. The 2 pound increase in price is simply passing along the increased costs to the customers.
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The people who pronounced Apple dead were the ones who noticed that Apple was losing very large amounts of money in the mid ninties. Apple only became profitable again when Steve Jobs came back on board and introduced the iMac.
If Apple continued in the path they were in before Jobs came back, then they probably would've been dead by now.
I wore an analog watch through most of elementary school and the first half of high school. When the strap broke, I found it was cheaper to buy a digital watch than to replace the strap, so I've been wearing mostly digital watches since then. Despite that, I find it easier to tell time on a digital watch. Mainly because I've grown up with digital clocks all around me - on the microwave, the vcr, the car radio, computer, etc.
I rarely think of time as half past four but rather as four thirty. I can usually tell the time rather quickly on an analog watch that actually has all 12 numbers written on it, but if you show me a watch that only has 12, 3, 6, and 9 on it, then I'll have to spend time thinking "is the hand closer to the 12 or the 3?"
In general, I think digital watches are practical, whereas analog watches are more for show. When I wear a suit, I feel awkward if I wear a digital watch. But in a more casual setting, I'll take a digital watch anyday.
Well, all the exploits I've seen had %01%00 in the URL. I have no idea what the %01 could be doing, but character 0 is used to mark the end of a string in C.
What's happening is MS is converting the %xx codes into individual characters and then handling the string with standard C functions, which stop when they hit character 0. Probably the right solution would be to notice the character 0 while parsing the URL, and simply not allow the URL if character is present.
A 9.1 gig hard drive - just one - costs $10 shipped from a [computergiants.com]reputable seller. [resellerratings.com] Another vendor [yahoo.com] is selling them for $5.99. How much do you think MS would pay for a few million?
Those $10 hard drives are models in the clearance bin because no one wants a drive that small. The seller is taking on loss on them just to get rid of the inventory. You won't be able to get someone to produce drives for you at prices like that.
Yeah, because not having a hard drive will somehow stop people from trying to get Linux to run on an X-Box, just like it stopped the folks from bringing it to the DreamCast and Game Cube.
There's a noticable number of people running Linux on the Xbox. You could probably count on your fingers the number of people that have tried using Linux on a GameCube. A GameCube running Linux is really only useful as a dumb terminal, whereas an Xbox with Linux can practically be a full computer.
Hey, I've got a good idea! Lets release a ten year old game at full price! But wait, there's less! Lets remove all the cooperative multi-player that made the game actually worth playing! No wonder The Lost Vikings bombed. It was decent as a 1-player game, but only truly great as a 2-player game.
As much as I want to agree with your logic, I can't.The GBA probably has almost as many ports of NES & SNES games as it has original games. Most NES & SNES ports are selling well on the GBA.
If you're downloading VisualBoy Advance, get version 1.5. 1.6 had bugs in the BIOS emulation. In 1.7, several of the choices in the Tools menu would cause VBA to crash on me. I didn't use it long enough to find out if the BIOS bugs were fixed.
Yes, I'm well aware that Xeons can go over 4 megabytes. But they can't go over it in one large block.
For most applications, you wouldn't notice if you were using segmented memory with segments of 4 GB. The only difference would be a pointer would be 6 bytes instead of 4. But when you actually need more than 4 GB to store one giant matrix, it would be very difficult to work around the limits.
I've never seen a matrix solver that could deal with the large memory schemes of 32 bit x86 chips. Even if one could, it would be a lot slower than doing it on a 64 bit chip.
I just did some work porting CFD code from IRIX to an Opteron system running Linux. The processor had to be 64 bit because some of the runs we do now require 15 GB of RAM.
I only did the porting work - I only have a vague understanding of how CFD works. So I can't say what percent of the runs require more than 4 GB of RAM, but I've gotten the impression that most runs require over 2 GB of RAM, which is enough to complicate things with a 32 bit OS.
These are also the same analysts that keep saying that Nintendo is dying, despite Nintendo continually raking in huge profits.
Don't start about their loss for the first half of this fiscal year. They posted a net loss of 3 million yen due to a 40 million investment loss. That means that if there wasn't a huge drop in the value of the US dollar, Nintendo would've posted a rather nice profit. You win some and you lose some when you invest your money in different countries. Note that Nintendo said they still expect to meet their projected profits for the entire year.
The analysts also predicted that the price of all the consoles would have a significant drop back at E3 last year, which didn't happen. The PS2 got replaced by a version that came with the network adapter for the same price, with existing stock getting a $20 price drop. The Xbox got a $20 price drop. Nintendo did nothing. This was with the analysts expecting $50+ price drops.
Saying that the console's price will drop sometime within the next 9 months is a pretty safe bet to make when you consider that the last price drop was 7 months ago. That price drop was a pretty minor one ($20). The last significant price drop was in May of 2002 when it dropped from $299 to $199.
NASA doesn't use very modern chips. They use old designs because they want stuff that's been well tested. If you're talking 20 MIPS, then we're probably talking about a chip that's 10-12 years old or so. I doubt there is much, if any, of a pipeline in the processor. This is probably around 486 level technology.
I think SMB3 got bundled later on, but the vast majority of its sales were standalone. Most NES systems sold came with SMB1, and there were relatively few standalone copies of the game sold.
The problem with WinRAR is it looks like the UI hasn't been updated since the Windows 3.1 days. The artwork is all ugly & low color. The dialogs all just look out of place. There's something I just can't place about it that feels wrong.
Technology wise WinRAR is a good program. But it's about as usable as a circa 1995 app for X11.
Everyone knows what happens in Episode 3, but what we don't know is how it happens.
How does Anakin become Vader?
Where does the name Darth Vader come from?
How come he doesn't know about that Padme has twins?
How does Palpatine gain total control?
How do all the Jedi die?
What Jedi survive other than Yoda and Obiwan?
Will there be an answer to why Obiwan and Yoda fade away when they die, but the Jedi we've seen die in Episodes 1 & 2 don't?
The biggest question I have is in Episode 3, will we see Anakin become Darth Vader, or will we see Anakin "die" and then Darth Vader first appear soon after?
If I want to fight, I have SCII
There's also Super Smash Bros Melee, Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance, Capcom vs SNK, and a few other lesser known games.
racing is Mario Kart:DD or F-Zero GX.
There's also Wave Race Blue Storm, Need for Speed Underground, Burnout, and at least a few others.
Team sports is NHL 2004, while extreme sports is Tony Hawk 4.
Granted Sega dropped their sports line from GameCube after the first year, but EA releases all their sports titles for it. Acclaim releases All Star Baseball. Midway has NFL Blitz and NHL Hitz for the extreme stuff. And there's Mario Golf and soon Mario Tennis if you want more party type sports games.
RPG is Zelda, etc.
Well, Zelda isn't an RPG. If you want RPGs, the Cube is a pretty bad choice as their are very few, although Namco has several coming out later this year. If you want Zelda type games, there's also Star Fox Adventures and Beyond Good and Evil for starters. Both of which are really cheap.
Nintendo's problem isn't so much a lack of games, but rather everyone just buys all the Nintendo first party games and ignores the 3rd party games. I've mostly just bought Nintendo's 1st and 2nd party games since the N64 days. Mainly because after getting the 1st and 2nd party must haves, I didn't have the time or money for many other games. So on Nintendo systems, 3rd parties get less attention and sales. Particuarlly the companies that just make crappy ports.
Associating Pokemon & rape would piss Nintendo off for good reason. That's a simple case of defending their trademarks.
Nintendo has never tried to stop people from working on emulators. When Shigeru Miyamoto was asked about them in public, he said he was flattered that people cared enough about his games to write emulators for them.
Nintendo's emuation is bad stance strictly comes down to the vast majority of people using emulators are doing it with pirated ROMs, which they have no tolerence for.
484.96 sounds pretty low to me. The GameCube CPU is a modifed version of the PPC 750 running at 485 MHz. Based on the site you linked, I'd expect it fall in between these two entries:
PowerPC 750/400 G3 801.67
PowerPC 750cx/600 iMac 1198.00
Why would you use Linux to develop a GameCube game?
All you'd get is a lot of unnecessary overhead. The hardware is designed to be incredibly simple to program. You don't have to deal with things like IDE to read from the DVD. To read from the DVD, you put a pointer to your memory buffer in one register. Put the write command into another register. There's a third register to check for status (finished, in progresses, error, etc). That's it. Adding the Linux kernel in there won't make it any easier.
Since the discs are read-only, the filesystem becomes much simplier. IIRC, fragmented files are not supported. So really the filesystem isn't much more than a table with each entry containing a name, a start location, and a size. Doesn't take long to write code for that.
The networking code is the only part of the kernel that's really useful on the GameCube. But rather than include an entire operating system, you're probably better off simply taking the networking code out of one of the BSD's and including it directly into your project.
If you're doing small homebrew projects, a full OS is way overkill for your game. If you're intending on making a commercial game, your choices are license the game with Nintendo, or have your own DVD manufacturing plant and reverse engineer the barcode & any other copy protection mechanisms on the discs. If you have the money to have a DVD manufacturing plant, then you can easily afford to pay Nintendo the licensing fees.
Basically, Nintendo has this illusionary image that they are a good, consumer-friendly company. And they are that for the most part. Even still, they're mostly just a company like any other -- if you get in their way, they will not hesistate for a second before coming down on you like a ton of bricks.
Nintendo is a very consumer friendly company. It's very rare to have a problem with their products. I own an NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, and GBA. I've had a total of 2 problems over the years. My SNES didn't come with a power cord, and the free Zelda Collection disc I got last month was damaged during shipping. Both times I called them up and they sent me what I needed via next day air. No hassles at all. They didn't even ask me to send back the broken Zelda disc, or ask for any kind of proof that I had just bought an SNES.
Nintendo doesn't mind emulators or homebrew development. In fact, they like homebrew development, because it means there's a pool of people who can program their hardware that they don't have to spend time training. But once you get into piracy, then they go all out and don't cut you any slack.
But it's their copy protection (burn/read from outside to in, among other theories) that has really stumped emulation enthusiasts like myself.
The idea of the data starting on the outside and working in has been tossed around a lot, but no one has really tried to test it.
What has been proven to be the main factor in the copy protection is the barcode around the inside of the disc. The barcode is found near the center of the disc, just a little further in than the data. The barcode can't be burned onto a disc - it must be put in during manufacturing. You need to use a microscope to make out the bars, but if you're magnifying it enough to distinguish them, you won't be able to see anything but the bars, leaving you no frame of reference, making it impossible to map the bars.
To my knowledge, only a small group of people have figured out how to rip a GC disk, and they're not sharing how. Developers of the Dolphin emu probably know how to do it as well.
It's simple to rip a GC disk. Load a program using the PSO exploit. Write code to read from the DVD and send the data over the network. Code for all of that is readily available.
I own the game and I had to read that several times to figure out what you were talking about. I can't imagine how that must sound if you've never seen the game before...
I'm assuming you were playing Monkey Bowling.
The key isn't a problem. You don't need to know the key ahead of time. CSS encryption is so badly designed that you can brute force find a key within a few seconds. Any recent Linux DVD player doesn't contain a key, it just looks at the DVD and figures one out.
They're admitting CSS isn't a trade secret anymore. If you know CSS, then it only takes a few seconds to find a key. Based on that, how can you justify calling the key a trade secret?
1) I think Europe has some restrictions on importing goods. These laws may not effect CD-WOW though, as they are based in Hong Kong and simply ship to Europe. The article didn't say if they actually have European offices.
2) A lawsuit doesn't have to be valid to file it. Even if BPI lost the suit, it would cost CD-WOW a lot of money defending themselves. Lawsuits are very expensive, and since CD-WOW specializes in selling really cheap CDs, it would really hurt them to have a long legal battle.
Yes, in the US price fixing is illegal. But if you read the article, in the scope of this story, it isn't price fixing.
CD-WOW was buying their CDs from Asia, where they are cheaper, and then selling them in Europe. BPI objected to this on the grounds that CD-WOW was violating their copyrights by not buying the CDs from Europe. Rather than fight a long legal battle over copyright issues, CD-WOW decided it would be easier to simply buy the CDs sold to Europeans in Europe than to fight it out. The price increase is due to increased costs for CD-WOW, not due to BPI insisting on them raising prices.
Yes, we all know that there is price fixing involved in CD sales, and that is what this *really* is about, but the actual case that was going to go to court was one of copyright infringement. CD-WOW was selling CDs for 9 pounds. You'd have to sell a huge number of CDs at that price to pay for lawyers to defend you against music industry lawsuits.
The reason the CDs were cheaper was because of where they were being bought from. The CDs were being bought from Asia, where they sell cheaper, and then being sold in Europe. The music industry wanted them to buy the CDs from Europe. Rather than fight it out in court, the store agreed with the music industry's demands and started buying the CDs from Europe. The 2 pound increase in price is simply passing along the increased costs to the customers.